The magma reservoir lurking beneath a dormant supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park far exceeds past estimates of its size, a new analysis shows.
"We found it to be about two-and-a-half times larger than we thought," said analysis team scientist James Farrell of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "That's not to say it's getting any bigger. It's just that our ability to see it is getting better."

The size finding, presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco last Thursday, has big implications for the extent of the volcano's impact when it next erupts.

The supervolcano underneath the national park last erupted on a massive scale some 640,000 years ago, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). It is a potential supervolcano, capable of spewing more than 240 cubic miles (1,000 cubic kilometers) of magma across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, with global climate effects.

"We believe it will erupt again someday, but we have no idea when," Farrell said.

A gene variant that seems to increase the risk of diabetes in Latin Americans appears to have been inherited from Neanderthals, a study suggests.

We now know that modern humans interbred with a population of Neanderthals shortly after leaving Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago.

This means that Neanderthal genes are now scattered across the genomes of all non-Africans living today.

Details of the study appear in the journal Nature.

The gene variant was detected in a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) of more than 8,000 Mexicans and other Latin Americans. The GWAS approach looks at many genes in different individuals, to see whether they are linked with a particular trait.

People who carry the higher risk version of the gene are 25% more likely to have diabetes than those who do not, and people who inherited copies from both parents are 50% more likely to have diabetes.

The higher risk form of the gene - named SLC16A11 - has been found in up to half of people with recent Native American ancestry, including Latin Americans.

When it comes to the rising prevalence of Type 2 diabetes, there are many factors to blame.

Diet and exercise sit somewhere at the top of the list. But the genes that some of us inherit from Mom and Dad also help determine whether we develop the disease, and how early it crops up.

Now an international team of scientists have identified mutations in a gene that suggests an explanation for why Latinos are almost twice as likely to develop Type 2 diabetes as Caucasians and African-Americans.

But here's the kicker: You have to go further back on the family tree than your parents to find who's to blame for this genetic link to diabetes. Think thousands of generations ago.

Harvard geneticist David Altshuler and his colleagues uncovered hints that humans picked up the diabetes mutations from Neanderthals, our ancient cousins who went extinct about 30,000 years ago.

"As far as I know, this is the first time a version of a gene from Neanderthal has been connected to a modern-day disease," Altshuler tells Shots. He and his colleagues the findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A few years ago, geneticists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany sent shock waves through the scientific community when they sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal from a fossil. Hidden in the genetic code were patterns that matched those in human DNA. And the data strongly suggested that humans were more than just friendly neighbors with Neanderthal.

A team of international researchers has found that a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania uses the same search pattern to hunt for food as many other animal species, according to a report published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The search pattern, also known as the Levy walk, involves a sequence of short travels in one area and then a longer hike to another area. Not just used to find food, the Levy walk can also be seen in the activities of sharks and honeybees.

"This movement pattern seems to occur across species and across environments in humans, from East Africa to urban areas," said study author Adam Gordon, a physical anthropologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York. "It shows up all across the world in different species and links the way that we move around in the natural world. This suggests that it's a fundamental pattern likely present in our evolutionary history."

"Think about your life," said David Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona. "What do you do on a normal day? Go to work and come back, walk short distances around your house? Then every once in a while you take these long steps, on foot, bike, in a car or on a plane. We tend to take short steps in one area and then take longer strides to get to another area."

San Francisco, California - Talk about a long-distance connection. Earth's orbital variations - the wobbling and nodding of the planet on its rotational axis and the rhythmic elongation of the shape of its orbit - can affect the shape of the sea floor, according to a talk presented here earlier this month at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Scientists already knew that orbital variations, which are driven by gravitational interactions among solar system bodies, pace the comings and goings of the ice ages by shifting where sunlight falls on Earth. During ice age cycles, much water moves back and forth between the ocean and ice piled on land as ice sheets, lowering and raising sea level by upward of 200 meters.

That cycles ocean water's pressure on ocean crust up and down. Now, researchers led by Harvard University geophysicist John Crowley have shown in a computer model that those pressure variations should vary the amount of mantle rock that melts kilometers beneath midocean ridges. That, in turn, would vary the amount of ocean crust that solidifies from the melted rock, changing the thickness of new crust by as much as a kilometer as it slides down either side of a midocean ridge. And the group found that indeed, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge (gray) offshore of the Pacific Northwest, the ocean floor is grooved like a vinyl LP record in time with Earth's orbital variations of the past million years.

The genomes of organisms from humans to corn are replete with "parasitic" strands of DNA that, when not suppressed, copy themselves and spread throughout the genome, potentially affecting health.

Earlier this year Brown University researchers found that these "retrotransposable elements" (RTE's) were increasingly able to break free of the genome's control in cultures of human cells. Now in a new paper in the journal Aging, they show that RTEs were increasingly able to break free and copy themselves in the tissues of mice as the animals aged. In further experiments the biologists showed that this activity was readily apparent in cancerous tumors, but that it also could be reduced by restricting calories.

"As mice age we are seeing deregulation of these elements and they begin to be expressed and increase in copy number in the genome," said Jill Kreiling, a research assistant professor of biology at Brown and leader of the study published in advance online Dec. 7. "This may be a very important mechanism in leading to genome instability. A lot of the chronic diseases associated with aging, such as cancer, have been associated with genome instability."

Whether the proliferation of RTEs is exclusively a bad thing remains a hot question among scientists, but what they do know is that the genome tries to control RTEs by wrapping them up in a tightly wound configuration called heterochromatin. In their experiments, Kreiling and co-corresponding author John Sedivy, professor of medical science, found that overall, the genomes of several mouse tissues become more heterochromatic with age. But they also found, paradoxically, that some regions where RTEs are concentrated became loosened up instead, particularly after mice reached the 2-year-old mark (equivalent to about the 70-year mark for a person).

Some of the world's most eminent scientists have severely criticised the arguments used by some influenza researchers who are trying to make the H5N1 bird-flu virus more dangerous to humans by repeatedly infecting laboratory ferrets.

More than 50 senior scientists from 14 countries, including three Nobel laureates and several fellows of the Royal Society, have written to the European Commission denouncing claims that the ferret experiments are necessary for the development of new flu vaccines and anti-viral drugs.

They also said it is "untrue" to state that the new mutations in the laboratory strain of H5N1, which have enabled the bird-flu virus to be airborne transmissible between ferrets and, potentially, people, have already been seen in nature.

The letter signed by 56 eminent scientists, many of whom are national science academicians, was designed to correct "misstatements" made by the president of the European Society of Virology, Professor Giorgio Palu, who they claim made "incorrect" assertions about the need to carry out the research in an earlier letter he had sent to the Commission.

The ferret research is being carried out by Ron Fouchier and colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. He has been involved in a legal dispute with the Dutch government which has insisted that he needs an export licence before his H5N1 work is published in a scientific journal.

• Chaser the dog now able to understand nouns and verbs, researchers say

• In first three years she learned and remembered 1,022 proper nouns

• The objects included 800 cloth animals, 116 balls, and 100 plastic toys

• Research carried out by Wofford College, in North Carolina

Border collies are known for their high level of intelligence.

But Chaser has proved herself as the undoubted top dog after learning to understand 1,000 words - plus a smattering of English grammar.

Researchers believe the nine-year-old has learned to respond to words in the same way that a human child does.

They say Chaser was able to demonstrate understanding of nouns and verbs.

One of the team said: 'Our findings showed that Chaser was successful in demonstrating syntax and semantic understanding on 75 per cent of the trials.'

The study, involving more than seven years of teaching and research on the border collie, was published in the journal Learning and Motivation.

The dog, born in 2004, lived in the home of the researchers, primarily as a member of the family, but also as a subject for research.

In the first three years, she learned and remembered 1,022 proper nouns.

The objects included more than 800 cloth animals, 116 balls, and 100 plastic toys.

Summary: Unconventional research embraces physics, artificial intelligence and the paranormal.

Cf. 'Billion dollar race: Soviet Union vied with US in 'mind control research'', Russia Today, December 17th, 2013
The title of this article comes from a recent paper by Serge Kernbach:

'Unconventional research in USSR and Russia: short overview', Serge Kernbach (Submitted on 4 Dec 2013 (v1), last revised 5 Dec 2013 (this version, v2))

This work briefly surveys unconventional research in Russia from the end of the 19th until the beginning of the 21th centuries in areas related to generation and detection of a 'high-penetrating' emission of non-biological origin. The overview is based on open scientific and journalistic materials. The unique character of this research and its history, originating from governmental programs of the USSR, is shown. Relations to modern studies on biological effects of weak electromagnetic emission, several areas of bioinformatics and theories of physical vacuum are discussed.

Nowadays almost every physicist is monitoring, one way or another, all the new papers in her/his domain of interest. The arxiv site is probably the most popular one among physicists, mathematicians and computer science researchers. It is not completely easy to submit a paper there. Not that there is a peer-review process there, but some kind of endorsement from some "well-established" scientist is needed. Otherwise your paper will not be accepted for pre-publication. Why was Kernbach's paper accepted? Because he has 16 papers already there. And also, probably, because of his affiliation:

Cybertronica Research, Research Center of Advanced Robotics
and Environmental Science, Melunerstr. 40, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany

Checking the publications of Serge Kernbach we find that his main interest is in the science and practice of robotics, mainly in "swarms of robots". An army of mini-robots can today be programmed to act in a way similar to the behavior of ants and/or bees. Look at these videos - they are amazing, and also somewhat scary:

A new scientific discovery that takes algae and turns it into crude oil in minutes rather than millions of years could be the end of constant worries over "peak oil."

Engineers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) announced that they have created a process that takes an enriched stew of algae and turns it into crude oil which, in turn, can be made into a usable bio-fuel. The development was announced in a recent issue of the journal Algal Research.

Genifuel Corp., a biofuels company from Utah, has licensed the technology and is attempting to utilize the process on a larger, industrial scale.

In a press release, PNNL described, "In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae."

The press release also noted that "conventional refining" is then capable of taking the man-made crude oil and turning it into usable biofuels. PNNL notes that the man-made crude can be made into "aviation fuel, gasoline, or diesel fuel."